A Rose In Any Other Language
by kabukichou
Summary: "Tadashi could try to force the Japanese on him as much as possible, but Hiro refused to learn a language just to honor the foggy and indistinct memories of a father he barely knew."


wow what the fuck who let this animated movie hurt me so much

or: i have language headcanons and you can't stop me from spreading them

some notes before we begin:

-apparently aunt cass is cass hamada, but i was under the impression from the family photos that tadashi and hiro's mom was the white one. unless naming conventions are different in san fransokyo, i figured cass was the mom's sister. in the comics, the parents are temeo and maemi, but since hiro and tadashi are apparently biracial, i changed the mom's name to mary.

-years are guestimated. bh6 takes place in an alternate, slightly futuristic world so i figured they're ahead of us, but not by centuries

-i'd like to apologize ahead of time for the probably inevitable butchering of all non-english languages. i'm drawing from my foggy memories of high school spanish and my slightly less foggy memories of being in anime fandoms. i'm pretty sure google translate was accurate for the spanish parts, but i'm not 100 percent sure about the japanese. if you spot any errors, let me know!

-like aunt cass, i am a middle class white girl who is abysmal at learning languages. i tried to be as respectful about this as possible. please let me know if i overstepped my boundaries in any way, if i'm being terribly ignorant, or if there's any other problematic aspects to how i approached this story.

* * *

Cass, though she ran a bakery/coffee shop in the heart of San Fransokyo, barely spoke any Japanese. Sure, she knew the essential phrases, but her job was baking donuts and not translating for the government for a reason – languages just weren't her thing. She'd flunked Spanish in high school, back in the days when everyone thought Spanish was the language to learn. She'd tried French an attempt to make her bakery feel more classy and authentic, but failed abysmally – all the reviews online said that it was just too tacky. When her sister Mary married Tomeo Hamada (well, Hamada Tomeo in his culture), she did made a sincere effort to learn Japanese, especially since most residents of San Fransokyo spoke English and Japanese interchangeably. Tomeo appreciated her efforts, even coaching her a bit in his spare time, but she just couldn't grasp it no matter how hard she tried.

At least the alphabet was the same with Spanish and French, and had a lot of words similar to English. Everything was different with Japanese, and she'd never managed to train her brain into seeing the kanji as words instead of pictures.

Mary and Tomeo had been smart. They decided ahead of time that any children they had would be bilingual; Mary would speak to them in English, and Tomeo would speak to them in Japanese. It worked wonderfully for their first son, Tadashi (Cass learned to respond to both "Aunt Cass" and "obasan" pretty quickly once he started talking). Most people in San Fransokyo had English or Japanese as their first language, and the other as a second language. For Tadashi, both were his first language, even though teachers for some archaic and probably white supremist reason still taught classes in English only.

With Hiro, it was different. He'd only just moved past the stages of simple statements and one-word sentences into the beginnings of understanding grammar and syntax (for both English and Japanese) when Mary and Tomeo died.

The months after her sister and brother-in-law's deaths were foggy and distant with a haze of depression and loss. Mary had been her only sister, and Cass had become close friends with Tomeo in the years that they'd known each other. Even though most days she could barely stand leaving her bed, she had to work in order to keep her bakery running so she could continue paying her bills. One top of that, Mary and Tomeo had named her as Tadashi and Hiro's guardian in their wills. She'd known about it and willingly agreed to do it, but the possibility of either of them dying before they were both old and wrinkly and gray was so slim that she never thought she'd actually have to adopt her nephews.

Given all her added responsibilities and grief, making sure Hiro continued to learn and speak Japanese was low on her list of priorities. It wasn't until almost a year after Tadashi and Hiro came to live with her that she even realized it was a big deal.

* * *

The special effects were laughable, the acting was melodramatic to the point of comedy, and even someone who'd never read _Dracula_ could predict the plot, but _Nosferatu _still had Cass jumping and biting back screams every time Count Olaf appeared on screen.

The story had her so enraptured that she didn't hear anybody approaching until the bottom stair creaked loudly in a dead giveaway.

"Stay back!" she yelped, jumping up and spinning around to face the intruder in a move that left her slightly dizzy and seeing stars from standing up so suddenly.

She blinked.

"Tadashi?" She said incredulously, and then lowered her arms (mindful of the bristling and startled cat in her arms – had she really held Mochi up like a weapon?) and sagged against her chair with a relieved sigh. "You scared the shiiii…_heck_ out of me!" Well…at least she was making an attempt to censor herself in front of the kids. It was the thought that counted. She frowned when he didn't say anything and turned on the desk light. Tadashi, standing a few feet away by the window, squinted at the sudden brightness.

"Tadashi, sweetheart, have you been crying? What's wrong?" His eyes were red and puffy, his cheeks looked damp, and he kept sniffling and wiping his nose with a balled up tissue. She stepped forward and took him by the wrist, drawing him close.

Tadashi pointed up the stairs towards his and Hiro's shared bedroom, a look of absolute misery on his face.

"Use your words, honey," Cass said patiently. Tadashi hadn't taken his parents' deaths well; he'd grown more reserved and quiet in the months since and generally didn't speak unless someone prompted him to. He was starting to grow out of it, but Dr. Wakatsuki had told her it could take a long time. "Did you have a nightmare? Is Hiro okay?"

"Hiro won't talk to me," Tadashi said, shoulders and head drooping as he leaned into her embrace.

"What do you mean? I could've sworn I heard him talking to you at dinner tonight!" Hiro had provided a constant stream of childish yet unnervingly mature conversation over a plate of spaghetti. As usual, all of it had been directed at Tadashi, who Cass was pretty sure Hiro thought hung the moon and stars in the sky.

"He ignores me when I talk to him in Japanese! He only listens and talks back when I talk to him in English," Tadashi said, hands balled up in fists.

"Maybe he's just going through a phase?" Cass suggested. Or maybe, since he wasn't being constantly exposed to Japanese, he'd lost the language. Her stomach twisted sourly and she felt guilty for not making a more sincere effort to learn it.

"Maybe," Tadashi said, though the tone of his voice and the doubtful look in his eyes betrayed that he bought into that suggestion even less than she did.

"Don't worry about it too much," Cass said, "children his age go through phases like this all the time. It's probably just like the time he learned the word 'no.'" And hadn't that been an adventure! Hiro had said 'no' to everything, even the things he liked or wanted, and then threw a fit when people thought he was being serious. Kids did go through phases like that; hadn't the news said something like that at one point? She should probably get around to reading a book on parenting eventually…

Tadashi nodded, but didn't say anything else.

"Go back to bed and try to get some sleep," she said gently as she fought back a rogue yawn, "Maybe Hiro will talk to you in the morning." Cass pulled him in for one last hug, then released him and ruffled his hair.

"Oyasumi, obasan," Tadashi said quietly, then turned and went back upstairs.

* * *

Cass found Tadashi moping at the kitchen table a few weeks later with her old, ratty copy of _A Beginner's Guide to Japanese_ resting in front of his folded arms. Immediately, her mind raced back to the midnight conversation they'd had that she had almost completely forgotten about.

"So, it's not just a phase?" she asked, her voice hushed as she pulled out a chair and took a seat beside her nephew.

Tadashi shook his head, eyes still focused on the tattered language guide before him.

She rested a hand on his arm, giving it a comforting squeeze.

"I'm sorry, Tadashi," she said after a moment. "It's my fault; I should've tried harder to learn Japanese. I should've made him watch those language videos for kids. I was just so focused on trying to keep the bakery running and making sure I wasn't totally screwing you guys up that making sure Hiro knew Japanese just totally slipped my mind – "

"It's my fault," Tadashi cut in. "I'm his big brother. I still know how to speak it, I should've been talking to him in it and stuff to make sure he didn't forget it. I'm a terrible big brother!" He groaned and let his forehead collapse onto his arms.

"Tadashi, don't blame yourself," Cass said, moving her hand to his opposite shoulder to give him a one-armed hug. "You're still a kid yourself, you can't be responsible for Hiro's entire upbringing, okay? That's why you're here with me, and not in some dingy one-room apartment in the shady part of town."

"But I'm his older brother! With okaasan and otōsan gone it's my responsibility to make sure he knows our culture, and I failed!" He scrubbed his eyes.

Cass bit her lip. As a middle class white woman, she couldn't possibly understand her nephew's struggle and frustrations. She felt remarkably out of place and unqualified to advise Tadashi on the matter, especially since she still thought the problem was at least partially her fault. Whatever she told him at this point would hardly be anything beyond simple platitudes.

"What do I do, Aunt Cass?" Tadashi looked at her with imploring eyes, and this, this _right here_, was exactly why she'd decided years ago that she'd never have kids. She was not mom material and young, impressionable kids should definitely not look up to her as an authority on anything but baking and _maybe_ horror movies.

She was probably supposed to feed him some positive everything-will-be-okay bullshit, but she'd hated that kind of stuff when she was a kid. So, she gave him the truth.

"I don't know, Tadashi."

* * *

"Ohayō, Hiro-bō! Yoku nemuremashita ka?"

Hiro grumbled as he shoved his head under his pillow and attempted to pull the blankets overtop. Tadashi had been talking to him in nothing but Japanese for almost two weeks now, and it was starting to make him _loco en la cabeza! _

"¡Vete!"he said from under all his blankets, because yes, he had learned Spanish just to annoy Tadashi. If his brother kept it up he'd learn French, too, or maybe even Arabic.

"Chōshoku no tame no jikan."

"¡No estoy escuchandote!"

Tadashi ripped the blankets off him without any forewarning, the blasé grin on his face making Hiro want to stick his tongue out at him and use that obscene gesture Mr. Nguyen down the street had given the cyclist that almost knocked him over even more.

"Tadashi!" Hiro hollered as he curled up in a ball, shivering at the sudden loss of his covers and giving his brother a baleful glare from under the messy fringe of his bangs.

"Boys!" Aunt Cass's displeased tone carried up the stairs, making the brothers freeze in their shenanigans. "If you don't get down here in thirty seconds, your pancakes will be cold and I will _not _make you another batch! Quit fooling around and eat your breakfast; I will not have you both be late on your first day of school!"

Hiro grumbled, but rolled out of bed and into his slippers, and then trudged down the stairs to the kitchen with Tadashi right at his heels.

Tadashi could try to force the Japanese on him as much as possible, but Hiro refused to learn a language just to honor the foggy and indistinct memories of a father he barely knew.

* * *

A few weeks into his classes at SFIT, Hiro found himself, on a whim, pulling back the screen that had shielded Tadashi's side of the room from his view for the past few months.

A fine layer of dust coated everything, and the bed released a soft cloud when he plopped down on it.

He'd refused to let anyone touch the space since Tadashi's death; he hadn't even let Aunt Cass clean it up. He'd known in his heart that at some point he would be ready to face the reality of his brother's absence, and hadn't wanted anyone to mess that.

In retrospect, it had been kind of rude for him to scream at Aunt Cass like that. Tadashi hadn't been just his brother; he'd also been Aunt Cass's nephew and practically her son. She'd raised him just as much as Mary and Tomeo Hamada had raised him in her own special way.

Tadashi's planner still sat open on his desk, open to the week of the convention. There was a note written in blue pen for that Thursday, a reminder for an appointment at the dentist.

On the bookshelf next to the computer, Tadashi had lined up all his notebooks and binders for class in one long alphabetized row. Hiro skimmed his fingers over them, stopping on the binder labeled "ENGR 331 – FLUID MECHANICS."

He pulled it out, flipping through the loose-leaf pages to examine Tadashi's neat handwriting and painstakingly neat diagrams. He recognized some of the material, partially from his own work and partially from his current classes. Doodles of machinery he recognized as Baymax's insides crowded some margins; apparently the class had inspired a few improvements in the robot's design.

Hiro looked through it for a few more moments, then carefully put it back in his place and continued to search Tadashi's room. He wasn't looking for anything in particular, snooping more to relieve a vague sense of desire, a want for something unnamable, more than anything else.

Remembering how he'd found the singular microbot back on that fateful afternoon, Hiro ducked down and peered under the bed. Besides the one sweatshirt that still smelled faintly of smoke and blood, he found a bunch of boxes.

He pulled them out and sat down, going through them one by one.

Two were shoeboxes that had nothing but a pair of dress shoes in each. One had a bunch of spare parts – wires, washers, nuts, bolts, etc. One had a stack of comics, still in their sleeves, sitting in it. Judging by the titles and covers, all were gifts from Fred. One of the comics (well, manga, really, given the art style, Japanese text, and back-to-front, right-to-left formatting) even had a sticky note stuck to the sleeve with "_use this as inspiration to build me a giant mecha to pilot – fred_" written on it in Fred's barely legible scrawl. The final box was slightly larger than others and filled entirely with notebooks.

Hiro pulled the bottom one out first, as it looked the oldest. It had some stickers on it – images of the Gen 1 Pokémon Tadashi so adored, as well as robots from various cartoons, anime, and movies.

Upon opening the cover, Hiro found "This journal is the property of Tadashi Hamadi. If found, please return to…" written in a sloppier, more childish version of Tadashi's handwriting. With trembling fingers, he turned the next page.

_**9 April 2035**_

_Aunt Cass has been taking me to see a therapist for a couple of weeks now. She says it's an important part of my "recovery process," but I don't know how talking to some creepy stranger is going to make me feel better. He told me to keep this journal. Dr. Wakatsuki looks like a creepy megane straight of an anime with his glasses. He writes down everything I say and asks me how everything makes me feel. "How does that make you feel, Tadashi?" It makes me feel like this is pointless and you're not helping, Doctor._

_He talks to me in English only, too. Even though his name is Japanese, he told me he was adopted by a white family when he was a baby and never learned to speak anything but English. It kinda makes me scared to think about. Aunt Cass is really nice and awesome for taking me and Hiro in after everything, but she's white and she barely knows any Japanese. _

_What if I forget how to speak it? _

_Will I forget dad if I don't keep it up?_

_I've heard that if you don't practice a language enough, you can just __**lose **__it, especially if you're around my age. What if I just lose it? Talking right now takes so much effort. It's a lot easier just to be quiet. Some days I wake up and feel like I don't even have the energy to say one word. What if that feeling never goes away, and I just forget how to talk in anything but English? _

_I miss __mom and dad__ okaasan and otōsan._

_See, English is already becoming more prominent in my mind!_

_-Tadashi Hamada_

_**14 April 2035**_

_I went to see Dr. Wakatsuki again today. His tie had a picture of a screaming baby on it, which I thought was too strange for me not to ask about it. He told me it was his daughter. What a weird guy. I can see it now – "Daddy, I have a crush on Jonathan!" "Well, sweetheart, how does that make you feel?" _

_Ugh. _

_Anyway, I did talk to him about the whole language thing. He said the best thing for me to do right now is to talk to myself in Japanese and to try and write as much of my journal as possible in Japanese, either in kanji or in romanized form. I think it's probably the smartest thing he's said to me in all my visits! _

_I tried talking to myself after the appointment, and found that I've already lost more of the language than I like. Why can't I remember how to say 'bird'? It's just on the tip of my tongue…_

_From now on, I'm going to try and make as many of my entries in Japanese as I can._

_-Tadashi_

Sure enough, when Hiro flipped to the next page, everything after that was written in careful, slightly shaky kanji. A lot of figures had scratches through them in places where Tadashi had apparently messed up.

Hiro leafed through the rest of the first journal and then through all the others, finding little more than a handful of words written in English. Over time, the kanji grew neater and looked more like someone's actual handwriting and less like something copied straight out of a textbook. Kanji were crossed out less and less often. Judging by the neatness of Tadashi's handwriting, he wrote in Romanized Japanese when he was in a rush, but otherwise most of it was written in blocky, foreign characters.

Hiro had made a point to avoid learning as much Japanese as possible when he was younger, but he still knew what his name looked like in Japanese. He spotted the familiar ヒロ several times in Tadashi's journals.

Huffing, he put down the last, most recent journal (the last entry dated the morning of the conference), and stared blankly at the wall. Maybe it was incredibly invasive of him, but he _needed_ to know what the journals said. He wanted this one last link to his brother almost as much as he hadn't wanted to leave Baymax in that colorful world beyond the portal.

He could just scan the journals and have the computer translate them, but the process would take forever. Plus, would the computer even catch all the subtle nuances of Tadashi's wording?

Hiro scowled. He wanted to learn Japanese so he could read Tadashi's journals, but he also didn't want to go against almost twelve years of steadfastly refusing to learn some pointless link to a father he couldn't even remember anymore.

He froze, breath hitching in his throat.

If he learned it now, he'd be learning it as a way to honor Tadashi, the brother who'd done more to raise him than Tomeo Hamada ever had. Tomeo had apparently been a really great guy according to everyone who knew him, but he still hadn't been there for Hiro the way Tadashi had. He deserved the honor, not Tomeo.

"Dammit, Tadashi," he said with a tired half-grin, rubbing at his forehead. "You always could talk me into just about anything."

Hiro put the notebooks back in the box in the same order they had been in before then slid the boxes back under the bed. He left the screen open halfway, then went to plop in his computer chair.

He had an entire language to learn.

* * *

Two months later, Hiro pulled out the box of journals again.

_**15 April 2036**_

_I remember how to speak Japanese better than I remember how to write it. A lot of the characters look the same. One stroke can change the meaning of a word entirely. _

_I have to look up kanji online a lot. It is tedious, but I like the challenge. Writing in the romanized form will only make me forget kanji more. _

_I have to study kanji a lot now. _

_-Tadashi_

_**17 March 2036**_

_Hiro has been very quiet since mother and father died. I was so sad, I didn't really notice. _

_I tried talking to him in Japanese two days ago. He ignored me. I tried again yesterday, and he still did not pay any attention to me. Today I tried __**again**__, and he only stared at me. _

_He is just four years old, but I can see very well that he is very smart. He knows how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, and I know that he could read before mother and father died. He is not just being stubborn; he has truly forgotten our language. _

_I have failed him. _

_As the elder child, it was my responsibility to teach Hiro about our culture in case mother and father died. Father told me this many times before their death. He told me to help the culture flourish and grow in Hiro, but now Hiro does not seem to understand me when I just ask him if he wants any water. _

_How do I fix this?_

_-Tadashi_

_**23 June 2036 **_

_Today was Hiro's fourth birthday. I bought him a robotics set for beginners as a gift. He seemed to like it very much. He has already started building a robot from it, but I do think it will take both of us to build the code. _

_Aunt Cass made a beautiful cake that looked like a robot. Hiro enjoyed it very much and said he felt bad eating it. He seemed very eager to eat its head, though. _

_He did not realize the head was made of just fondant. He thought it was too sweet and spit it out almost right away. The look on his face! _

_I have not seen him smile so much in many months! It made very happy. _

_May there be many more years of happiness to come,  
Tadashi_

_**2 November 2040**_

_Hiro is too smart for his own good. _

_I was sound asleep last night when I was woken up by a sudden loud whirring in my ear. Imagine my surprise when I rolled over to find Mochi hovering in the air just by my head on a set of rocket paws Hiro designed behind my back! _

_It scared me half to death! _

_I feel bad; in my ensuing panic I accidentally broke a camera Hiro apparently had out to record my reaction and I almost knocked Mochi right out of the air. Luckily I didn't destroy any parts of the recording, when he showed me the footage I did have to admit my face when I first woke up was pretty funny. _

_Eight years old and already building hover-boots…what will he be up to when he's twenty? _

_(Now __**that's**__ a scary thought!)_

_-Tadashi_

_**2 April 2045**_

_I'm so close to completing Baymax! Dr. Callaghan assured me that being only 65 trials in and as close as I am to completion is amazing considering the complexity of Baymax's intended purpose. I haven't told Hiro about him yet, so I can't wait to see his face once I'm done! _

_I'm nowhere near as smart as Hiro, but I think Baymax has the opportunity to make a lot of change in the world, and for the better. _

_He's going to help so many people. _

_-Tadashi_

_**25 April 2045**_

_I __**may**__ have__** finally**__ managed to talk Hiro out of bot-fighting. You'd think getting arrested for betting on bot-fighting would be enough of a deterrent (even though they weren't able to prove he'd actually bet anything and Aunt Cass convinced them an entrance fee wasn't the same thing as betting), but not for fourteen-year-old boy genius Hamada Hiro! Some days it feels like he thinks he's actually Tony Stark, which, thankfully, is not the case._

_I lured him to my lab under the guise of having to pick something and managed to stage an "accidental encounter" between him and Dr. Callaghan. I think having him meet one of his idols and a few select words of encouragement finally pushed him to consider college and a career beyond illegal bot-fighting rings. _

_On a side note, remember how I finally completed Baymax last week? I unveiled him to Hiro today, and my little brother did not disappoint! He was very impressed, and even offered some suggestions for improvements that I will have to look into. Maybe it's selfish of me, but it's not often that something manages to genuinely amaze Hiro about robotics, and it made me happy that he felt that way towards this simple school project. I think the fact that he was actually impressed was a catalyst in him (tentatively) leaving bot-fighting behind. _

_If I never have to end up in a jail cell or act as his getaway driver again, it will be too soon. _

_-Tadashi_

_**17 June 2045**_

_The convention is this evening. No matter what happens tonight, Hiro's work will undoubtedly change the world. His microbots are amazing! That they're controlled through a neurotransmitter and not through some handheld device is so science fiction I can barely believe my baby brother is responsible for it! _

_There's no way Dr. Callaghan will see Hiro's work and __**not**__ invite him to attend SFIT. They let __**me**__ in even though I'm only just slightly above average; the odds of them turning down my fourteen-year-old super genius robot-building brother have to be incredibly low. _

_I'm not even the one presenting tonight and I'm nervous! _

_I don't think I've ever been prouder of Hiro than I am of him today. _

_-Tadashi_

Fittingly, Tadashi's final entry was on the last page of the journal.

Hot, wet tears spilled over Hiro's cheeks and threatened to drip on the pages as he stared at his brother's last written words. Quietly, he shut the journals and put them all back in their box.

"Aishiteimasu, aniki. Ore wa itsumo anata o oboete irudarou."

* * *

Translations:

Oyasumi = goodnight  
Oba-san = aunt  
Okaasan = mother  
Otōsan = father  
Ohayō = good morning  
-bō = honorific used as a term of endearment for babies and children; exclusively male  
Yoku nemuremashita ka? = did you sleep well?  
Loco en la cabeza = literally "crazy in the head"  
¡Vete! = go away!  
Chōshoku no tame no jikan = time for breakfast  
¡No estoy escuchandote! = I'm not listening to you! (informal)  
Aishiteimasu, aniki. Ore wa itsumo anata o oboete irudarou. = I love you, big brother. I will always remember you.

tadashi's japanese in his journal entries are basic and stilted on purpose. i wanted him to struggle to retain the language, especially the written portion, as he probably didn't need to write in japanese as much as he needed to speak in it.

(i wanted hiro's final words to tadashi to be mako mori's final words to stacker pentecost but i couldn't find what she said anywhere or what the complex translation was of it beyond "i love you, sensei")

if you want to see the cake cass made for hiro's birthday, you can roll on over to read the fic on ao3 or my fic tumblr account c:


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